Monday, April 30, 2012

Quebec Classroom War Shakes Canadian Elites

Thousands of students protested against the fee rises in Montreal last Saturday

There's been an almost total media blackout around the rest of the world, so you'd certainly be forgiven if you've not heard of it, but young people in the largely French-speaking province of Quebec in Canada are taking part in perhaps the biggest student uprising since Paris 1968.

Véronique Boulanger-Vaugeois, an unemployed graduate who has been active in the student movement, told the National Post that: "For me the student movement, the student strike is just one part of
everything we have to resolve[...]The student movement is one
in which the youth give us the energy, give us the power to refuse what
is going on right now." But is also an expression of outrage against "the entire capitalist, neo-liberal context that over time ends up
having a very harmful impact, both locally and internationally, on the
environment and on humanity."

The Canadian ruling class senses that a student victory could prove a turning point in class struggle generally, and is determined to hold out. Montreal Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Michel Leblanc declared that Quebec's government "shouldn't give in or make any compromises". In the province's major daily La Presse, a former editor argued that students must be defeated so as "break" the "mold" of "attachment to the status quo … of acquired rights". The current editor was more explicit, spelling out elite fears that "If the Charest government were to follow the advice of the left and
wets who, while in favor of the tuition fee hikes, tremble at the sight
of a ‘crisis,’ there would no longer be the means to carry out any
reform whatsoever in Quebec."

"We must organize to regain lost ground. In the 1920s
and 1930s, the fascist movements did this by giving leftists a taste of
their own medicine. This lesson was so seared into their memories that
three quarters of a century later, they still demonize this reaction of
political good-health."